Lo smoking

What is your favourite Italian word? I’ve asked this question many times and have been asked it even more. Of course, it changes over time, partly with my mood and partly because I keep discovering ever more beautiful words. 

I do like pronominal verbs, of which Italian has a rich seam and no real equivalent in English. I love fregarsene both for how it sounds and because Italians are usually shocked to hear it come out of my mouth.  I once flew to Pisa on what must have been one of the first flights after Covid. As I arrived at the car hire counter, which in my memory was covered in several months of dust, I was asked which car I would like, as they were basically all available. “Me ne frego” I replied, proudly. Somewhat incorrectly, as I subsequently learned. Or perhaps it was a legitimate answer, but not the one I had quite intended. There are also certain historical associations best avoided.

I do still love fregarsene, and chi se ne frega even if I use it slightly inexactly. But some months later I found a new favourite. I came across a group of words that were ostensibly English, had entered the Italian language, but in doing so had been bent into something slightly different. Among them were snobbare, spoilerare, il mister, il golf, and il sexy shop - which definitely made the shortlist and sounds so much nicer than its grubby English equivalent.

But really, there was no competition as soon as I heard that Italians call a dinner jacket Lo smoking. Americans, of course, had already gone their own way and in the 1880s had started to call it a tuxedo, after Tuxedo Park, a private club in New York State. Around the same time, Italy started to use lo smoking for the same garment. 

We did have smoking jackets in the UK. In mid-Victorian Britain an upper-class man would wear a dress coat or evening tailcoat for a formal dinner. After dinner, when the men withdrew to smoke, they might take off their tailcoats and put on a smoking jacket - usually in velvet or silk. This was for comfort but also to protect their formal clothes from ash and smoke. And in fact the modern dinner jacket traces its origins to around 1865, when the Prince of Wales is said to have commissioned a short, tailless evening coat for less formal dinners. It was based on the idea of a smoking jacket, but not the same thing. This distinction, it seems, did not travel.

In fact, though entirely coincidental, I rather like the idea that this one item has different names in the UK, America and Italy. Because, after all, it has different associations in each country. In the UK, certainly for those of my generation, you would likely associate it with a ball at university or a formal work event - both prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s when we all thought we were Sebastian Flyte or, at the very least, wanted to look like a Sloane Ranger. Americans might be more likely to associate it with a prom (sadly this word and concept is now in England too, but that’s a different story) or even a wedding. British weddings have only recently started to embrace black tie, beginning to displace the more traditional morning dress. Much as I hope that morning dress might cling on, I fear it may go the same way as the red squirrel. 

What would Italians associate lo smoking with? Perhaps James Bond? One of our greatest exports, obviously. Cinema, perhaps? A première? The opening night at La Scala? Marcello Mastroianni? Certainly something more glamorous than the annual haulage industry dinner at a slightly tired London ballroom.

I have owned several dinner jackets in my time and worn them to more university balls, black-tie PTA fundraisers in school halls and work events in those tired London ballrooms than I can remember. I even had a white one once. I am not sure what I was playing at, and was ribbed all night long for wearing the “away kit”. None of this ever felt particularly glamorous.

Perhaps I was calling them the wrong thing? Perhaps I would have been more Mastroianni if I had worn a smoking? But please don’t ask me to wear one to a wedding, whether in London or Rome. After all, I am a red squirrel kind of chap.